Susan Sarandon and Heifer: Passing on the Gift in Cambodia

I am in a van with Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon and her daughter Eva Amurri, bouncing along a dirt road in the Cambodian countryside, and are heading to a village where Heifer International is working. This is a working trip: Sarandon and her daughter are supporters—they are visiting Heifer projects and filming fundraising videos…

I am in a van with Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon and her daughter Eva Amurri, bouncing along a dirt road in the Cambodian countryside, when we overtake a heavily laden motorcycle, piled with six fat hogs lying on their bags, skinny legs flapping, eyes blinking with each bump. “Oh my God, they’re alive!” says Sarandon, adding after a pause: “Maybe they’re on an outing—going to the museum.”

We are heading to a village where Heifer International is working. This is a working trip: Sarandon and her daughter are supporters—they are visiting Heifer projects, filming fundraising videos, as well as visiting shelters run by Somaly Mam for girls who have been saved from Cambodia’s brothels. Sarandon’s humor is appreciated, because we have been witnessing some overwhelming scenes. We have just visited one of Somaly’s shelters, where young former sex slaves—one little girl is three—are getting educated, building new lives. You just wonder, how could a three-year old end up in a brothel? It’s incomprehensible.

As we lurch along, Keo Keang, a former chemistry teacher who heads Heifer International in Cambodia, briefs us on the project we are about to visit. Heifer, a nonprofit based in Little Rock, Arkansas, empowers farmers around the world, especially women, by providing them with livestock and training. Here in Cambodia, the first thing Keang talks about is the Khmer Rouge, whose brutal tactics ravaged the country, leading to more than 2 million deaths out of a population of 8 million between 1975 and 1979. “The Khmer Rouge killed our society," says Keang. "We want to make it alive again. There was too much suffering. People were so afraid—they thought, I can’t talk to you, you can’t talk to me, maybe you will kill me. So at Heifer, we help people work together.”

It seems like such a long time ago, until you realize that it all happened within people’s lifetimes. I ask about Keang’s own past. “My father and uncle were killed by the Khmer Rouge,” she says. “My mother took care of me and seven siblings. I worked in the fields and sold corn and other vegetables, carried on my head, after school.” She recalls a friend, whose mother and young sibling were taken away by the Khmer Rouge. The girl followed them, and watched in horror as they were killed. “My mother always said, ‘If they arrest me, don’t follow,” says Keang. She shrugs and smiles. Sarandon, Eva, and I are all silent for a few moments, absorbing what she has said. “No matter what,” she says, “I still have this picture in my mind. We can never forget.”

In recent years, tourists have been pouring into the country—these days, more than 2 million a year visit the ruins of Angkor Wat. Chic hotels and boutiques now line the busy streets of nearby Siem Reap. But what is becoming clear on this trip is that behind that veneer of modernity, Cambodia is still suffering from a toxic mix of poverty, lack of education, and the ravages of the Pol Pot years. When they ruled the country, the Khmer Rouge, following an extreme communist dogma, broke down family units, splitting up women, men, and children into separate communal living quarters. A whole generation of educated people was killed. Traditional values—village relationships, family, respect for elders—were smashed. In the recent years, traditions have been replaced increasingly by commercialism and corruption.

To make things worse, with the international peacekeepers who arrived in Cambodia in 1993 came a growing demand for sex workers. Prostitution—the opportunity to make fast money, the sudden access to women—undermined deeply conservative attitudes toward sex. HIV spread like wildfire, infecting two percent of the population by 1998. The infection rate has dropped to 0.5 percent, but commercialized sex, along with the jarring influence of pornographic videos that have come into the country, have had devastating effects: According to Keang, these days it is common for men working in the towns and cities to have as many as 30 partners in a month, while their wives stay home in the countryside, caring for the children. Condom use is rare; sex education is almost nonexistent. “We gave them condoms,” Keang tells us, “and then a farmer complained. He said, ‘I have eaten five of them and my wife still got pregnant!’”

We pull up to Anlong Sar Pagoda Village, where dozens of residents, dressed in their best (bright T-shirts, colorful sarongs, and flip flops), are waiting for the Movie Star and Heifer officials to arrive. We are here for a “Passing on the Gift” ceremony. Villagers place crowns of pink lilies on Sarandon’s and Eva’s heads, then lead them past clapping farmers to a muddy sty, where pigs and chickens and a group of farmers clutching hens and piglets are lining up. Families who received livestock a year earlier from Heifer will each pass two of the offspring to another family.

Tinny music is blaring from a loudspeaker, and it is very hot. After about an hour of standing in the broiling sun, several families push in closer and begin to hand over their animals. The heat and the noise clearly are starting to get to Sarandon: Standing between the farmers, she smiles wanly. The pigs are shrieking wildly as they are handed over to her.

The villagers then push into a large tent, and a series of politicians give droning speeches. At last, it is Sarandon’s turn, and she gamely takes the mic. “I have never been so close to pigs that are so talented and sing so much,” she says. (The crowd laughs, and I’m thinking, ‘good translation!’) “Thank you so much for sharing with me and for giving me so much hope for the future.”

Afterward, I talk with Chen Seap, 31, a girlish mother of four who just finished handing piglets over to a neighbor. Dressed in Barbie doll finery—a bright pink, tight, polyester lace top and sarong—she explains to me how Heifer has helped the villagers form a cooperative that lends to members who need cash. “I feel so lucky to be able to join this project,” she says. And then, without prompting: “We have became closer with our neighbors and learned together. It was not good before—people thought, you’re rich, I’m poor, or, I won’t join you because you’re poor. But now if you need money, you can borrow money.”

I have known about Heifer for years—mostly because every Christmas back in Brooklyn we receive a beautiful catalogue in the mail, asking us to buy livestock for families around the world. My kids each choose a project to support and we make a donation. But here in this village, it’s clear that Heifer is about much more than just giving farmers livestock. What Chen is telling me—and what Keang has been trying to explain—is that the organization is really working on healing an entire society. “There was a stigma towards Khmer Rouge people,” says Keang, “so we have tried to unite Khmer Rouge families with other families.” She adds: “Community values were destroyed. We are trying to rebuild communities.”

A few days later, we are in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. Somaly Mam, who runs the shelters for young girls, has invited Sarandon, Eva, and Keang and the Heifer staff for a boat ride on the Tonle Sap River. We pile on a 50-foot wooden sampan, and introductions are made as we pull out at dusk, just as the low-lying city’s riverfront bar district starts to come to life. Bats are swooping overhead, as we pass the Royal Palace, with sloped, saffron eaves. I ask Keang again about life under the Khmer Rouge. “I ate insects,” she recalls. “The ones like worms are my favorite, but grasshoppers are delicious, too!” She explains, with precision, the technique: Insert a peanut into the cricket’s belly, then sauté. “Delicious!” she says. Somaly chimes in: “Oooh, I LOVE insects—I eat them all!”

The two women are getting excited. Keang recounts how she and her friends used to string up a light bulb and rake in the crickets that fell into the bowl of water below. “Grasshoppers are especially good with beer,” says Somaly, smacking her lips with a gusty laugh. “Even better with red wine!” Keang replies. They do a high five. Amused by the exchange, Sarandon adds her two cents: “Maybe the two of you should write an insect cookbook!”

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